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If someone’s ever wanted to be hunted down and possibly sacrificed or be the hunter themselves, boy howdy, do I have the game for them. Dead By Daylight is an asymmetrical online horror game where one killer hunts down four survivors. The survivors’ main goal is to escape, while the killer’s main goal is to keep the survivor from escaping. It is available on multiple platforms like PC, Xbox, and PS4, but the cross-platform play is currently unavailable. Dead By Daylight’s gameplay, balanced characters, and lore really make it an enjoyable experience despite all the flaws it has.

Dead By Daylight is essentially a more fatal version of hide-and-seek. The killers serve as seekers. Their jobs are to hunt down, catch, and sacrifice the survivors by putting them onto meat hooks. Survivors’ main goal is to repair several generators located around the map. In rounds where survivors don’t disconnect before everyone has loaded in, they have 5 generators to repair, but there are 7 generators on the map. These generators will power the exit gates, which are used to escape and win the game. There’s more to the game than survivors running and killers chasing them though. Both sides have perks that give them extra abilities to help them achieve their goals. Survivors have items to aid them, these include things like toolboxes used to repair generators faster or medkits to heal themselves. In addition, all killers have a unique power and main weapon that they use to catch survivors. In addition to all of this, there are also events that add things like new objectives and items to the game. These events usually coincide with real-life holidays such as during Halloween last year there was an event called The Hallowed Blight. During this event, there were cosmetics available for many survivors and killers that could be bought with Putrid Serum. This serves as currency gained through gameplay during the event. There were also Halloween themed items available. There’s a lot to the game, far more than can be explained in one paragraph, and it all comes together to create a thrilling game.

Behaviour InteractiveThis is promotional art for the most recent event in Dead By Daylight. This was the Moonrise event that was meant to celebrate the lunar new year.

While all the killers are more powerful than the survivors, they are outnumbered four against one in every trial. Though, there are other ways, depending on the killer, that the game levels the playing field for them. For example, the Nurse can “blink” which is essentially teleporting, but she also has a base movement speed of 96.25%. While the survivors’ movement speed is 100% while running. Other killers such as the Legion and the Spirit have powers that allow them to speed up, the Legion goes up to 132% and the Spirit goes up to 176%, because of this when they are “walking” their movement speed is 110% instead of the usual 115%. Along with having a reduced movement speed while using her power the Spirit also cannot see survivors rather she can only see the scratch marks they leave behind and the Legion cannot see the scratch marks while dashing. Survivors are meant to be much weaker than killers, but the game achieves this without their weaknesses being excessive. While survivors are slower than killers in chases they have windows they can vault through faster than killers can and palettes they can use to stun killers and, once they’re thrown down, most killers can’t vault the palette but survivors can. Having a balanced game is something that is valuable in games like this.

The backstory behind this game is interesting and well thought out. Every survivor and killer is referenced to be dead or simply “missing” in their backstory, this realm presumably serves as an afterlife to them. It is ruled by an all-powerful being simply named ‘The Entity’ by Benedict Baker, an unseen survivor character who players can see the journal entries of. The Entity puts killers and survivors through endless trials where killers are meant to sacrifice survivors and the Entity feeds off of the hope that survivors have to escape. This being has both parties trapped in its realm just so they can provide it entertainment in the form of endless killing and running. Survivors and killers can also burn offerings to the Entity to give them advantages in trials. In addition to the lore behind the Entity’s realm, every survivor and killer have backstories. The killers were all either murderers in life or died with a vengeance. The survivors are just a couple of unlucky humans that got caught by the Entity for one reason or another. The creators have put a lot of time into making sure that the game doesn’t feel like just some characters and sound effects, it feels like a cohesive world with dynamic characters.

Dead By Daylight isn’t perfect though. There’s plenty of glitches to be found in the game, a lot that came with the update for the newest DLC. A lot of these glitches are cosmetic and don’t affect gameplay at all, making it a bother but not game breaking, such as one bug where when a survivor throws down a pallet they may continue to run without displaying the running animation. There have also been bugs that have resulted in game crashes, for example, there was an issue that would cause a crash when players would try to load into the new map, Mount Ormond Resort. However, the devs responded quickly by disabling the map to fix the issue. The team behind Dead By Daylight have also changed hitboxes on various objects such as palettes multiple times but for the most part, they seem to get more and more broken with every update. For example, in nearly every game played someone will get hit by the killer even when their weapon doesn’t physically connect with the survivor. There have also been massive issues with palettes stunning killers when they’re fairly far away from the object itself but, these issues have mostly been fixed. Overall Dead By Daylight may have an excessive amount of bugs but very few of them actually affect gameplay, and even when they do the devs have been quick to respond to fix the issues.

Some may argue the issues with Dead By Daylight are too big for anyone to enjoy, but everything else keeps me coming back. Everything put together, the gameplay, the characters, the lore, they all meld together to create a game anyone from the most casual to the most competitive players can enjoy. It’s a game that anyone slightly interesting in horror can pick up and have a field day with.